And then you pray.
It's looking at a high school yearbook photo and drawing the same person at 50. It's exit polling in 2006 and predicting who will be elected president in 2016. It's planting rows of corn today, trusting that droughts and bugs and floods don't wreck the crop before harvest.
Worst of all? "You plant the seeds on Monday," says Kevin O'Connor, "and on Tuesday, people come back and say, 'OK, let's eat.' "
Understandable. Utah has been on a starvation diet for three years now, its annual playoff feast spoiled by inexperience, underachievement and especially injury. Fasting isn't so easy for a city that once gorged on postseason berths, 20 straight years' worth - especially when the seeds of a new crop have been so publicly sown.
"This can be a very good basketball team," O'Connor, the senior vice president who assembled these Jazz, says confidently. "So let's see their improvement."
All together now, Utah: Yes, let's see it.
The Jazz still are mostly young and largely inexperienced, in NBA terms still a team of the future, not the present. Yet the core of this team, Larry Miller's quarter-billion-dollar investment in potential, has worked together for two full seasons now. Nobody expects day-after victory parades, but those pricey seeds have had time to germinate at least a little.
The sense that the Jazz's playoff drought will end, must end, next April is strong around Salt Lake City. It's strongest inside the Delta Center.
"There's pressure," says Jazz coach Jerry Sloan. "I told the guys at the beginning of the year - this team needs to make the playoffs."
The guys wearing the uniforms feel it, too. "It's been too long since playoffs," says Andrei Kirilenko, putting down his fan mail to consider the prospect. "We are definitely playoff team. For me, season is no good if we don't make it."
Seasons have been no good for three years, then, but last season may have been the most painful of all. Mehmet Okur had a breakout season, Deron Williams shored up the team's biggest weakness, and Kirilenko led the league in blocked shots. But Carlos Boozer's bad hamstring torpedoed half his season, Gordan Giricek limped away for the final 45 games, and the Jazz went 3-10 whenever Kirilenko's wrenched back kept him in street clothes.
Tallied up, it means Miller has spent nearly $50 million on his expensive trio of forwards alone, just in the two years since O'Connor went all-in with this core - the price is a whopping $32 million this season - and he has no idea yet whether it was all just a sucker bet.
"I think we're all confident," Miller said last week. "But we really just want to see what would happen if everyone was healthy for a change."
Can't blame him for that.
O'Connor realized that rebuilding the Jazz would require the fortitude to act decisively when the opportunity arose - probably more so for this NBA franchise than any other, given the unlikelihood that an All-Star-caliber free agent would ever choose Utah. The trick, he explains, is to lock up players when they're young, before they have achieved stardom (or, to heighten the risk, proved that they can), then trust in your decisions and wait for affirmation.
And wait. And wait.
It takes patience and guts, but O'Connor hasn't wavered, not publicly anyway. He made sure Kirilenko wouldn't go anywhere by handing over $86 million. When he struck out in the free agent market in 2003, he refused to panic by signing a lesser-quality player, choosing to hoard his salary-cap space for another year.
When Okur and Boozer became available, he swallowed hard and bet six years of the franchise's future on them, spending a combined $138 million to bring them to Utah. He traded three first-round picks to move into position to seize Williams, filling a fourth position for the long term. And in Ronnie Brewer and perhaps C.J. Miles, he is hoping for an inexpensive solution for several years at the other guard spot.
The work is not done - O'Connor's next priority is "a long, athletic kid who can block some shots and rebound the basketball, maybe [not] the best scorer in the world," he says - but the franchise's most difficult challenge now is keeping faith that the gamble will pay off eventually.
"How long did it take Dallas to get really good? They struggled awhile, [even with] a couple of great players," Sloan says. Does he see similar room for growth with his team? "Without a doubt," he says quickly. "If they work hard, every day. It's tough to go out there every day and bust your butt. It's a tough job."
So is waiting and wondering and watching for incremental progress. It's been two seasons, sure, but this has been a five- or six-year strategy all along.
"If your three best players were 22, 24 and 25," O'Connor says, speaking of Williams, Boozer and Kirilenko, "what would you say to me? And Memo's 27, and he's really only three years into the league. . . . We're patient to see what happens with this team. Now, we're not going to be patient forever. But we're patient to see what happens."
pmiller@sltrib.com
